CIBI, one of the Philippines’ leading credit reporting agencies, has been in the industry for four decades now, catering to both consumer and commercial credit lines. As it continues to innovate, CIBI envisions to accelerate financial inclusion in the country while offering its clients up-to-date tech-first products backed by rich datasets that are most recent, most accurate, and widest in coverage.

Until now, managing data in the country in line with local compliance and governance has been a tremendous challenge for CIBI. Serving a major market, the Banking and Financial Services industry, one has to deal with regulators, related laws and guidelines, among others. Not to mention, when using other cloud providers, CIBI’s running IT spend was quite intensive. As they pursue innovation and strive to remain an industry leader, a growing clientele is a simultaneous gain, which also means CIBI should be able to scale and deploy its solutions without any hassle.

Alibaba Cloud entered the picture and proactively helped CIBI solve the challenges above. CIBI was impressed by Alibaba Cloud's global recognition partnered soon after. CIBI got access to a local data center that provides access to a highly scalable and reliable cloud infrastructure that allows CIBI to maintain PII compliance and fulfill regulatory requirements. With Alibaba Cloud’s ability to deploy broad, cost-effective solutions, CIBI now gains access to more than basic infrastructure, leveraging solutions from Alibaba’s ecosystem that apply to the financial services sector.

CIBI adopted the following cost-effective solutions within the Philippine cloud region: • Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) ensures high efficiency by running containerized applications on the cloud, assisting CIBI’s application hosting.
• ApsaraDB Relational Database Service (RDS) supports instance management, backup and restoration, log audit, and monitoring and alerting. • NAT Gateway enables multiple instances within a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to communicate with the Internet or private networks, and Server Load Balancer (SLB) distributes network traffic across groups of backend servers. Both solutions improve CIBI’s architecture agility and flexibility. • In terms of security, a Fortinet solution on Alibaba Cloud (deployed on ECS) safeguards the system to avoid traffic attacks. Accessibility is also a key factor CIBI researched. CIBI considered Alibaba Cloud's services based on location, deployment of services, and performance.

As user's requirements scale, Alibaba Cloud's local cloud services continue to match the demand needed by CIBI within the Philippine market. Moving forward, Alibaba Cloud will work with CIBI on future projects that encompass affiliated and related entities to credit reporting, while keeping up with industry compliance and standards.